Best Employees Training Methods: 7 Easy Steps

According to Gallup, 59%of millennials (who will soon be the backbone of the workforce) consider on-the-job training to be their main argument when choosing an employer. Not surprisingly, lots of companies are concerned about creating an internal corporate training system.

However, many barriers and difficulties await businesses on this path (from employees’ unwillingness to learn technical bugs). What are the steps to integrate corporate training into your business processes, why do you need to track students, and how do you make sure that they do not slack off on learning?

Also Read: How Search Engine Marketing Can Help Your Business

Barriers to e-learning implementation

The e-learning method is less costly than the “live” method, both in the team’s monetary terms and working time. However, companies often face various barriers that prevent them from unlocking their full potential, and it is Redwerk, that e-learning development company, that can unlock the full potential of training. These problems can be divided into several notional groups:

• Personal barriers of employees. Team members may not be aware of the benefits of e-learning. Some employees may mistakenly assume that retraining indicates a lack of training and precedes dismissal from their jobs.
• Professional or direct training barriers. Training programs do not always meet the needs of employees and do not take into account their work schedules, schedules for meetings with clients, and other important nuances. As a consequence, “students” will avoid studying in any way they can.
• Misunderstanding on the part of management and employees of the fundamental tasks that corporate training solves. If it is not aligned with the company’s business goals and does not have specific achievable KPIs (which all participants in the process know), the effectiveness will be extremely low.
• Technical challenges. E-learning software needs to be set up so that it runs smoothly and is fully tailored to the size and unique needs of the business. Otherwise, you could end up with an expensive product that won’t have the desired effect.

Step 1: Define your objectives.

Any corporate training requires a significant investment. So even before you implement an LMS, you need to think carefully about what you want to achieve with this system. Making the planning stage is the longest step in e-learning development.

It is crucial to correlate corporate training objectives with the company’s actual business goals and needs. It will help you understand how to implement and in what direction to develop the LMS.

As a result of the training, employees (depending on their department) should achieve business goals for sales, productivity, or customer communication effectiveness. In addition, setting business goals for the LMS will subsequently help assess whether the e-learning program is working as planned and what needs to be changed in it to get closer to the original KPIs. Developing e-learning without understanding its ultimate goal will lead the project to fail.

Based on the critical business goals and objectives, it is also worth developing a formal e-learning strategy. It should be a dynamic “philosophy” reflecting the company’s business practices, corporate culture, internal and external environment.

Therefore, it is worth involving all stakeholders in its formation and then referring to the document each time before developing or changing training plans, programs, and courses to “reconcile the coordinates.”

Also Read: 6 Top Personal Finance Saving Tips For Programmers

Step 2: Recognize employee needs.

When you invest in your employees and their needs, you can never go wrong. That’s why all developed courses should consider the interests of the team and cover its weaknesses.

For example, “techies” need to understand how the company’s products work, while training in sales and communication with customers is tied to specific scripts and scripted conversations – these are entirely different training models.

Surveys and feedback forms determine the needs of employees (and gaps in their knowledge). Only after studying them is it worth taking specific individual steps to develop and implement e-learning.

In this case, your training development efforts will be focused, and the training materials will be relevant to both the employee and the organization.

To illustrate, have a look at  2014. Cisco invested in a training program for contractors and staff. It included more than 46 courses, and most of the company’s employees and partners didn’t know where to start at first.

After noticing this, Cisco decided to add three levels of certification (Specialist, Strategist, and Master) and several sub-levels to the program. The LMS became more apparent and more interesting for trainees – as a result, employees had completed more than 13,000 courses by the beginning of 2018. That’s the effect of customizing the training system.

Also Read: 20 Best Netflix Original Anime List To Binge-Watch In 2021

Step 3: Find a reliable contractor.

Another critical point is to decide who and how exactly will create a corporate training system for you. You can delegate this task to an internal IT department, buy ready-made courses in the cloud, or hire a team to outsource.

More often, managers resort to the second and third ways because hiring and supporting a large in-house corporate training team costs a pretty penny.

If you choose to outsource – find a reliable IT solutions provider with a quality portfolio, positive customer feedback, and an understanding of the business processes in your industry. Ask what technical means (e.g., animation, interactive formats, use of 3D or VR technologies) this team uses.

Step 4. Integrate the LMS into the company’s IT infrastructure

Integration of HR management systems, analytics, and accounting IT solutions with e-learning programs will help reduce duplication and promptly obtain more accurate personnel data.

For example, synchronizing LMS with BI allows you to create interactive dashboards with employees’ results before and after training – and plan their development on this basis. This means it helps improve talent management and maximize the use and unlocking of the team’s full potential.

Step 5: Pay Attention to Detail

Try to integrate e-learning into your work processes as painlessly as possible. For example, provide access from mobile devices for employees who are constantly on the move. If you have an international team, consider the language barrier and translate training materials whenever possible.

And pay attention to the work schedule of your staff. If there are very few employees (and they are overloaded with work) – develop individual training programs. This approach will allow each “student” to learn only what will come in handy in practice.

In addition, you can use a microlearning format: training courses consist of small modules that can be completed in a few minutes (e.g., before negotiations or between work calls).

Also Read: 35 Motivational Family Business Quotes

Step 6. Develop a control and evaluation scale

One of the critical advantages of e-learning is tracking students’ actions: it allows you to see students’ progress and 100% realize their potential.

For such control to be effective, your HR department should work as closely as possible with the developers of the system and training courses.

For example, in one of our projects, we developed three assessment questionnaires together with HR specialists.

Sequential (questions are one after another), free (questions are shuffled), and one page (the user sees all the questions he needs to answer at once). This made it possible to achieve a more accurate assessment of the team’s knowledge.

Step 7: Make your employees fall in love with training

Employees need to be motivated to learn and improve their performance. A huge incentive for them can be recognition of achievements. That is why company managers often establish KPIs (e.g., number of clients per month, number of goods sold, etc.) and use them to determine employees’ effectiveness.

If a person succeeds during a specific period, he or she gets a financial or non-financial reward. This element of gamification and competition greatly simplifies the adaptation of e-learning in the company.